I HAD BEEN called into Marshal Raborn’s office. It was a neat, square room. The only thing in the room that was messy was the desk, as if he’d straightened every edge in every file cabinet, and then left file folders on his desk overnight and they’d bred into short, unsteady towers of paperwork. Raborn was the local marshal in charge. If I’d been a regular marshal he’d have been more in charge of me, and Edward, but the preternatural branch was rapidly becoming its own entity, which meant Marshal Raborn was frustrated. He seemed to be particularly frustrated with me.

“There have been rumors for decades that Seattle has a weretiger clan,” he said.

I gave him blank cop face, polite, interested, but blank. Every group of wereanimals, or kiss of vampires, runs its business slightly differently. The white tiger clan of Las Vegas and the vampires are very public about who they are, and what they’re doing. The red tiger clan of Seattle, not so much. In fact, Seattle wasn’t aware they had a tiger clan in residence. The queen of their clan liked it that way. Wereanimals were still people under the law, so they’d never been legal to kill on sight the way vampires had been before the new vampire citizen laws went into effect, but once someone shifted into animal form a lot of people panicked and a lot of wereanimals got shot. I’d been on the receiving end of more than one attack by a wereanimal, so I sympathized, but at the same time some of my best friends turned furry once a month. I was a little conflicted. Marshal Raborn thought so, too.

He seemed to want me to say something, so I said, “Sorry, I haven’t been on the ground long enough to pick up rumors yet.”

“There are weretigers here, Blake. I know there are.” He gave me a steely, penetrating look out of a pair of gray eyes the color of gunmetal. It was a good hard stare. Bad guys probably folded like cheap card tables when he gave them the stare, but I wasn’t a bad guy.